Are you an excellent writer?

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Nope.

A lot of learning happens through imitation, and then abstraction and synthesis. I couldn't write anything if I didn't keep reading at the same time. But like I said, I never get any kind of input on what I do write, so I may actually be much worse at it than I feel I am, and I may actually have no idea what I'm talking about. I don't assume I know what I'm doing, I just play in the sand and build sandcastles that nobody ever sees but me.

Last edited by kestrel on 14 Jan 2012, 3:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Not to be disagreeable, but, from what I've observed, you're a pretty decent writer (especially from what I've observed in my daily personal experience).

Well, it seems to be working pretty well for you (from what I've observed here at WP).

Hopefully, maybe one day I can put as much thought into my writing as you do in yours. Half the time, I feel my writing is only "good" because most of the folks I write for wouldn't know "good" writing" fro "bad" writing if their life depended on it.

Thanks for giving me more to ponder.

You know, if I posted that last reply on any other forum I've ever visited, it would have immediately killed the thread. I hope I didn't sound like a pedantic jerk. I have a tendency to babble on and on with this subject because I never get to talk about it. Lots of stuff coiled up in my clearly addled mind. Thank you for the kind words, XFilesGeek. I get worried I'm not making sense to anyone but myself half the time, so it's nice to hear.

That's a great talent to have. It's also a hard one to learn since you have to engage your writing with the reader's perspective in mind - a thing most confusing without a good intuition for it. Language is a clunky and unwieldy thing. Writing is wonderful because you can polish it, edit it, and change it until you're confident it won't be as easy to misunderstand. I have a lot of issues with this, myself, but I can hope I'm getting better with practice. I'm clueless when it comes to speaking, so writing is my lifeline to understanding.

I write well enough to be my company's "Go-To Guy" for writing manuals and reports.

As a fiction writer, however, I just can't quite seem to get the hang of a good character-driven story without relying on tropes and cliches.

Oh thank you, that's very kind.

I feel my writing tends to be a bit incoherent and idiosyncratic, which might damage what I'm trying to communicate.

When I write my blog posts or longer forum posts I seem to need to edit them over and over...

I think pretty much everyone in this thread is an excellent writer. Proof of this would be evident if you visited any other non-technical forums, where the quality of writing is abysmal (and where half the posters wouldn't know what "abysmal" means).

I'll just mention my time working in the typing pool of a police force. My job was to type up handwritten statements for court (handwritten by the officers, not the witnesses; they just signed them), and to make it difficult we had to be exact. Errors in spelling and grammar and everything. Simultaneously, my partner was teaching secondary school pupils. There is very little difference in spelling, punctuation, grammar or handwriting between most police officers and most 13-year old students.

Who says Aspies don't do original metaphors!

Have good days and bad days, both with writing and being a conversationalist.

I do that too, I just use the preview function repeatedly before I post anything, and might rewrite even a simple post multiple times before finalizing the post. I find that my own coherence waxes and wanes quite dramatically day to day, sometimes the words just flow from my fingertips while other times this nonsensical stream of conscience comes out that I have to massage into readable form. Used to drive me crazy in school when they made me turn in multiple drafts, half the time they bore no relationship to each other from revision to revision, and my teachers didn't tend to like that.

I'm a fairly decent writer. I write often. Don't judge me by my posts on here as I'm often upset and/or drunk. That leads to many run on sentences.